New Features in Ubuntu Server

These technologies further position Ubuntu Server as the best OS for scale-out computing. Quality also had a strong focus with continuous integration, deployment and testing of upstream OpenStack commits and automated testing of all cloud images on Amazon EC2 from 12.04 forward.

Format: 2 support for charms (which eliminates usage of python-only formatting in favor of json)

Java

Ubuntu 12.10 provides Apache Tomcat 7 as the default, supported version of Tomcat. Existing installations of tomcat6 will continue to function; its recommended that users upgrade to the tomcat7 package as soon as possible.

Apache Solr has been update to the latest 3.6.1 release. Apache Solr provides a horizontally scalable indexing and search platform based on Apache Lucene.

Jenkins has been updated to version 1.466.2, the latest LTS release from the Jenkins project.

Configuration Management

Cloud Images

Query2, a new meta-data service for describing the Ubuntu Cloud Images and their availability, has been made available for testing and comment. This new meta-data service provides a verbose, machine-readable JSON formatted file that exhaustively describes the currently available Ubuntu Cloud Images hosted on cloud-images.ubuntu.com and official Ubuntu images in public clouds (currently limited to Amazon EC2). The "Query2" data format is open for comment, and as such may change.

the default user 'ubuntu' is no longer pre-baked into the images, but is now created by cloud-init. Further, using cloud-init cloud-config, users can be created at launch time, including the option of user-less instances.

Other

A new package 'overlayroot' added as part of cloud-initramfs-tools allows easy utilization overlayfs for the root filesystem. This allows you to boot with changes made to filesystems to be diverted to another filesystem. The second filesystem can be encrypted, a tmpfs, or another disk. This is useful as a cloud-guest and is used by MAAS's ephemeral environment.

Due to a binary naming issue between the node and nodejs packages, nodejs now ships with its binary installed to /usr/bin/nodejs. Users of nodejs applications sourced from outside of the Ubuntu distribution should either use the nodejs-legacy package (which continues to provide /usr/bin/node) or migrate their applications to use the /usr/bin/nodejs interpreter.

Common Infrastructure

Secure Boot

Ubuntu 12.10 is the first Ubuntu release to support UEFI Secure Boot, a standard for controlling what software can be run on a computer. Supporting Secure Boot, a part of the Windows 8 certification requirements for client systems, ensures that Ubuntu will continue to provide an "it just works" experience on new hardware.

Due to time pressures, only some flavors released with 12.10 will install and boot on Secure Boot hardware:

Ubuntu desktop

Ubuntu server

Edubuntu

We expect to enable all other flavors in 13.04.

Migration-support deprecated

The tool responsible for migrating user accounts from other operating systems to Ubuntu (migration-assistant) has been removed from the installer.

Transitioning of the i386 generic-pae flavor to become the generic flavor offering

Collapsing of the virtual flavor back into the generic flavor

Homogenizing the entire linux-meta package

Arrival of a new highbank arm server kernel flavor

Changing of the default scheduler from cfq to deadline

Packaging updates for signed kernels

Python 3.2

The Ubuntu desktop has begun migrating from Python 2 to Python 3. Most Python applications included in the desktop and their dependent libraries have been ported to Python 3. In most cases, Python 3 versions of libraries are available alongside their Python 2 counterparts. Ported applications will only run with Python 3. Work will continue in Ubuntu 13.04.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

Java Toolchain

Ubuntu 12.10 ships OpenJDK7 as the default Java implementation. This brings improved performance, new features and better compatibility with other Java 7 implementations.

Use of the OpenJDK6 is now deprecated and the openjdk-6-* packages in universe for Ubuntu 12.10 will not be provided in future releases of Ubuntu.

Installation

Overview

Preparing your computer for Ubuntu is now much simpler, with a wider range of disk setup options. Each of these are detailed at length to provide you with a clear understanding of the actions that will take place with your selection.

Download

Ubuntu Server 12.10 images can be downloaded from a location near you:

From other release

Known Issues

OpenStack

The configuration format used by nova.conf has migrated from gflags (--option=value) to .ini (option=value) syntax. Packaging will use Nova utilities to convert existing config files to the new format, configuration management users take note.

Deployments that host nova-network on the same node as nova-compute will encounter issues preventing instances from obtaining IPs using DHCP. This is caused by vhost_net enablement by default on newer kernels and can be worked around by adding a single iptables rule. (1029430)

The default web root for the Horizon dashboard has moved from / to /horizon. (1020313)

The default install of Openstack should be used on a protected network, as many components use http (non-SSL) as a transport, and therefore subject to security concerns. (978963)

Installation

Booting the Ubuntu installer in UEFI mode from a USB disk on certain Samsung laptops (530U3C, NP700Z5C) may trigger a firmware bug that renders the machine unbootable. Users are advised to use caution when installing on Samsung laptops and ensure that they are configured for legacy BIOS mode, not UEFI mode. (1040557)

The consolidation of desktop installation media into a single image means that some installation options that were previously available on the alternate CD have no direct replacement on the desktop image.

Users who were installing using the alternate CD to install with LVM or full-disk encryption can now use the desktop image for this.

To install LTSP, please install using the Ubuntu Server 12.10 image, then add ltsp after installation. You can also continue to install with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS media and upgrade to 12.10 from there.

There are several options for installing using software RAID. You can:

The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the "Try Ubuntu without installing" boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)

ARM OMAP4 machines will sometimes boot to a black screen during installation. It's likely that the system has booted fine, but you will need to switch to another tty then back to tty7 (Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then Alt+F7) to get graphics. (1065902)

On ARM Panda boards with no external storage attached, the installer interface will be confusing and installation is likely to fail. We strongly recommend attaching an external hard disk when installing on Panda boards. (1053030)

On a mac with an external display can not run in framebuffer mode error occurs on the 2nd reboot onwards. (1066883)

Kernel

On some systems, when opening lid, there is a kerneloops with a suspend/resume failure message seen. (1054732)

On certain ASUS machines with AMD graphic chips, a WMI event and ACPI interrupt are sent at the same time when hitting the hotkey to change display mode, resulting in the display mode being changed twice in succession. Users can work around this using the Displays panel in System Settings for changing display modes. (1052278)

On ASUS N53SN laptops, the kernel does not boot without noefi on commandline. (1053897)

Networking

In order to improve compatibility with other local nameserver packages, NetworkManager now assigns IP address 127.0.1.1 to the local nameserver process that it controls instead of 127.0.0.1. If the system's /etc/resolv.conf is absent or is a static file instead of the symbolic link to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf installed by default then this static file will have to be updated by the administrator in order to continue using the NetworkManager-controlled nameserver.

Libvirt

Windows vms which previously worked with 'vga' video now need 'cirrus' video.

Toolchain

Python 2.7.3 includes a fix for a security vulnerability affecting Python's dict and set implementations. Carefully crafted, untrusted input could lead to extremely long computation times and denials of service. Although disabled by default, vulnerable applications such as CGI scripts can explicitly enable "hash randomization" to prevent this exploit. Due to implementation details of this fix, virtualenvs created with older 2.7.x releases may not work with 2.7.3. Specifically, the os module may not appear to have a urandom function. This problem can be solved by recreating the broken virtualenvs with the newer Python 2.7.3 version. See http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 for full details. (954595)

MAAS

If you are using juju to deploy to an ARM-based MAAS cluster, you need to use the --constraints arch=arm option to the bootstrap command. Juju by default will request an amd64 node which wouldn't be available in this case.

The following issues will be fixed in a zero-day stable release update:

With some hardware, MAAS incorrectly registers the memory attributes of nodes during commissioning. The result of this is that when deploying services using juju with a memory constraint, MAAS will not be able to provide a suitable node. (1064638)

MAAS DNS configuration is invalid after a node gets enlisted if a custom node name is not provided. (1066958)

The MAAS region worker by default connects to the wrong queue. This will cause a warning message about "The region controller does not know whether any boot images have been imported yet..." to not disappear in the MAAS Web Interface. If MAAS also controls DNS, this will not work either. Please see 1067929 for a workaround.

Other

Users who are using bonded network interfaces may experience a race condition on upgrade which can stop the bonded interface coming up on boot. This may cause problems for those performing remote upgrades. (974218)

Users who install Ubuntu Server on a Panda using encrypted partitions will not be able to use usb-attached keyboards to enter the password for unlocking the disk on boot. The password can be entered by enabling serial console and entering it from there. (1066376)